


the bees were not to blame

by kirael



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Gen, Space AU, raspberries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 12:52:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10967640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirael/pseuds/kirael
Summary: Hercules Mulligan plants a garden.





	the bees were not to blame

The first thing Hercules does when he gets home is abandon it. He contacts a cousin who’s freshly married to a girl he met during the war, and offers the two of him his place: a cozy little nook tucked in a small corner of the capital city.

“Where’re you headed?” the young captain of the trading ship asks, leaning up against the cargo hold door and looking Hercules up and down.

There’s bundles of bright purple and pale blue flowers stacked up behind her, held in suspended animation until they reach their destination. “Wherever you got those flowers from,” Hercules replies.

The captain lets out a low whistle. “Little agricultural place on the other on the outskirts of the new States. Barely industrialized. That’ll be more than a little ways away,” she says.

Hercules digs into his knapsack, slips the captain a few coins, and climbs into the cargo hold. He finds a comfortable spot nestled between canvas bags and reinforced crates, and lays down on the floor, and falls asleep.

They arrive a month later, the last of Hercules’s money spent on meals and little trinkets from the places they’d stopped at – a little doll made out of flower petals, a tuning whistle, a jar filled with bioluminescent bacteria (“Harmless things,” said the woman who’d given it to him.), and dozens of other knick-knacks.  

“Thank you,” he says to the captain, and gives her a pale blue gem as a token of appreciation.

He helps the locals sort through the produce and products the trading ship had brought and earns himself enough favor to gain access into the community of the central hub of the land. For the first week, he stays with a minor bureaucrat that, in exchange for sex and stories, offers to get him in contact with her uncle, who lives in a community up north. She’s never stepped foot outside her own little planet, she tells him, but she’s hoping her government job will lead somewhere. _Anywhere_.

“The war’s shaken everything up,” she says over lunch – she likes to cook, a sort of independence drilled into her from her parents, who remembered a time before the automation creeped into their towns on the edges of civilization. “New laws handed down every day from on high. No regard for us little places. I swear, if I had dug in my heels at the beginning of this blasted thing I could’ve been the one calling the shots. Now I have to do things the hard way.”

Hercules thanks her for the meal, as he always does, and helps her clean up.

When he leaves, he gives her a hairpin decorated with birds.

He makes his way up past the mountains by train until he finds himself at the doorstep of an elderly gentleman who offers him tea, which he declines, and shows him in.

“She called me ‘bout a week ago,” he says. “Said she had a fella who needed a place to stay. Now, don’t think you’ll be doing this for free. I got a few odd jobs a young man like you can handle. Say…” –and at this point he turns around to get a second look at Hercules- “you look young enough for the war.”

“I did my part in it,” Hercules replies. “What kind of odd jobs?”

A year into his extended stay, he receives a call.

“Hercules Mulligan? This is Hamilton. If you get this, please call back.”

He doesn’t reply, and discards the message as soon as he can.

With the help of the other townsfolk, he gets his own little farm up and running. He adopts a pet – a tiny mongrel of a thing that doesn’t do anything to protect his vegetable patches from the thieves or raiders but is scrappy and comfortable to cuddle at night.

The first year, he plants flowers near his front porch, digging up the weeds until sunset and then watching Nessus run around trying to catch fireflies with her mouth, her tail wagging wildly behind her.

His first patch of land he really takes time to cultivate is the berry fields that yield nothing for the first two years and then bloom delightfully with round, heavy fruit that he barely manages to wrestle away from Nessus. He hands out boxes full to all his neighbors with the sort of delight even the rainiest of days can’t chase away.

The flowers that spring up unintentionally around his gardens are so pretty he can’t bear to cut them away, so he doesn’t, and every time the weather turns hot there are bright blue and yellow streaks across his land. He climbs up to the top of a nearby hill to enjoy them.

There’s stories that float around years and years – decades, even – after the revolution, one of which involves a prison ship, and survivors that later became the pillars of the modern day States. Journalists dig, and dig, until they hit a tiny planet on the outskirts of their world.

Hercules hears a knock on his door.

The young girl that stands in front of him carries a voice recorder and an auto-transcriber and looks to be shaking out of her fine, fashionable boots.

“Come on in,” he says.

“I’m sure you heard the news,” she says as soon as she sits down. “Alexander Hamilton is dead. Killed! Murdered!”

“I have,” Hercules says.

“I’m doing a sort of piece on him – his life, his family, his friends, and, well, I found you! I was wondering if you’d talk to me?”

She sounds unsure of herself – lost, even. Hercules takes pity on her.

“Of course,” he says. “What would you like to know?”

She smiles at him. “Well, you knew him back on the _Majesty,_ right? You can start then.”

What can he say about Alexander Hamilton? He barely knows Hamilton, now.

There’s a cup of raspberry juice on his countertop, made from the fruit in his fields. It’s sweeter than anything he’s ever tasted. He takes a sip, and starts talking.

It ends up being more about him than Alexander Hamilton, but it's his life. He can't tell it any other way. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so. This fic happened. It's meandering and has no central purpose, but it's about Hercules Mulligan, and it's about location therapy, and it only has a vague connection to the series that I started ages ago and the themes that it tries to talk about. And it may be a bit OOC, but what can you do. Anyway, to sum it up, it's about 1000 words of wish fulfillment and nostalgia, and that's about it.


End file.
